Intuit confirms Mailchimp acquisition

In what is believed to be the most expensive acquisition of a private boot-strapped company, Intuit has confirmed that it will acquire Mailchimp for $12 billion. It will add the customer engagement platform to its portfolio of accounting and financial solutions — Turbo Tax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mint. Like those solutions, Mailchimp’s offering is primarily targeted at small and mid-sized businesses.

Mailchimp was founded in 2001 as an email platform but has gradually grown into an integrated automation and engagement solution. Last year, it launched Smart Platform, making AI-driven next-best-action and product recommendations available to its SMB market. Intuit currently serves about 100 million customers worldwide; Mailchimp has 13 million global customers.

Intuit expects to finance the acquisition through cash on hand and approximately $4.5 billion in new debt.

Read next: Mailchimp brings AI to the SMB market

Why we care. Mailchimp played a shrewd long game, boot-strapping itself from an email solution with a cute name to a marketing platform with a significant international presence — a presence its acquisition by Intuit is likely to increase. Its avowed mission was to provide enterprise-level technology at prices SMBs can afford.

By adding Mailchimp to its existing roster of solutions, Intuit moves towards being a one-stop shop for SMB tech needs serving an enormous global market. $12 billion is a sizeable price tag, but less than half of what Salesforce paid for Slack in July of this year.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.